The Meaning of in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty

Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication College of Communication 2014 “We Are Not Free”: The Meaning of in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty Casey R. Kelly Butler University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ccom_papers Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Social Influence and oliticalP Communication Commons, and the Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kelly, Casey R., "“We Are Not Free”: The Meaning of in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty" (2014). Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication. 93. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ccom_papers/93 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Communication at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “We Are Not Free”: The Meaning of <Freedom> in American Indian Resistance to President Johnson's War on Poverty Casey Ryan Kelly Abstract This essay examines how the ideograph <freedom> was crafted through dialectical struggles between Euro-Americans and American Indians over federal Indian policy between 1964 and 1968. For policymakers, <freedom> was historically sutured to the belief that assimilation was the only pathway to American Indian liberation. I explore the American Indian youth movement's response to President Johnson's War on Poverty to demonstrate how activists rhetorically realigned <freedom> in Indian policy with the Great Society's rhetoric of “community empowerment.” I illustrate how American Indians orchestrated counterhegemonic resistance by reframing the “Great Society” as an argument for a “Greater Indian American.” This analysis evinces the rhetorical significance of ideographic transformation in affecting policy change. Keywords: Clyde Warrior, Freedom, Ideographs, National Indiana Youth Council, War on Poverty In 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) and created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee and distribute federal funds to community anti-poverty programs. President Johnson's War on Poverty was a response to a national poverty rate of 19% and the failure of post-war prosperity to proportionally distribute wealth throughout society. Zarefsky (1977) explains that War on Poverty advocates “saw a society in which channels of mobility were closed and the poor were walled into ‘the other America’: they saw a nation in which the social structure denied the poor the opportunity to achieve values which were shared with the rest of the country” (p. 354). Goldzwig (2003) and Clayson (2010) add that the Johnson administration viewed the War on Poverty as part of the civil rights agenda, one believed to have the best chance of success because of its color-blind approach. Despite the program's egalitarian rhetoric, the poverty problem was anything but color-neutral. Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) exposed not only the unique and disparate impact of poverty on people of color but also the extent to which racism, violence, and poverty were interconnected. In other words, poverty among African Americans, Latinos, American Indians, and other racial minorities was “the historic and institutionalized consequence of color” (p. 72). In post-war America, American Indians remained the poorest of the poor (Cornell, 1990). Reservations endured unemployment rates ranging from 40 to 90%, Indian workers earned incomes nearly one-third of whites, and only 65% of Indian children attended school (Olson & Wilson, 1984). As a result, American Indians experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide, infant mortality, preventable disease, and alcoholism (Johnson, Champagne, & Nagel, 1999). Thus, to address poverty in total was to delve unavoidably into the realm of Indian policy. In fact, by 1968, Indian anti-poverty programs had grown so significantly that President Johnson established the National Council on Indian Opportunity to coordinate their management. The nation's short-lived focus on poverty provided American Indian communities with unprecedented access to government funding and the opportunity to bring public attention to the historic failures of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Moreover, because the discursive field of anti-poverty advocacy was populated with key-terms such as “self-help,” “choice,” “freedom,” “community action,” “self-determination,” and “maximal feasible participation,” it prompted many young American Indian leaders to utilize the War on Poverty to circumvent BIA paternalism and create an imperative for local control of all Indian-related federal programs (Deloria & Lytle, 1984). The consultation process mandated by the EOA provided rhetorical venues such as public hearings, leadership workshops, and meetings with federal officials where reservation communities could speak back to the government about the poverty problem. The War on Poverty opened space for Indian activists to also expand the scope of the conversation beyond poverty to rhetorically redefine role of government in Indian Affairs. The aforementioned key terms were, however, sufficiently vague as to invite what Schiappa (2003) calls a “definitional rupture,” in which factual appeals to what “is” are at odds with that which pragmatically “ought” to be (p. 10). For the BIA, abstract terms like <freedom> had long guided Indian policy but were often defined as individual economic mobility within mainstream America; however, for American Indians, the term connoted the collective ability to make choices for themselves. The vast chasm between these definitions was not denotative but ideological: Euro- 2 American concepts of <freedom> and community were mired in both post-war philosophies of economic individualism and much older commitments to a Lockean philosophy of natural rights and private property, both of which were unsuitable to American Indian self-determination (Engels, 2005; Kelly, 2010). Indeed, because their definitions are almost always imprecise and reflect the ideology of the user, terms like <freedom> might be more appropriately called ideographs, or one-word summations of a political ideology that structure adherence to a collective political consciousness (McGee, 1980). For the BIA, <freedom> was enacted through the maximization of one's labor power and personal initiative free of either coercion or assistance. Thus, American Indian progress toward <freedom> was indexed by rates of assimilation, acculturation, and urbanization (Fixico, 1986). Ironically, “progress” often involved curtailing Indian-directed initiatives, yet was often presented by policymakers in a language of “freedom, emancipation, and liberation” which “redefined assimilation as the fulfillment of a Native civil rights agenda” (Kelly, 2010, p. 359). American Indian activists who participated in War on Poverty programs also found themselves confounded by Euro-American definitions of <freedom>, and thus called for an entire revision of the term. In this article, I examine how American Indian activists utilized a moment of definitional rupture to challenge the ingrained ideology of Indian Affairs. I focus on the ideograph <freedom> as a pivotal though contested term that shaped the desired philosophy and practices of Indian Affairs. I examine not the spectacular protest movements of the decade but rather the arduous task of resisting dominant conceptions of <freedom> from within the process of consultation and implementation that unfolded at the reservation level. One of the most prominent voices in this conversation was that of Clyde Warrior (Ponca) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), a radical organization he helped establish out of a profound dissatisfaction with the older generation of Indian leaders and their acquiescence to federal power structures. Buttressed by a radical Indian youth movement that engaged in occupations of federal lands, strikes, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience, the protest rhetoric of activists like Warrior and the NIYC were able to transform, in part, the concept of <freedom> from its individualistic connotations within the lexicon of liberal capitalism to a notion tied to the War on Poverty's commitment to “community empowerment.” I examine Warrior's resistance to the War on Poverty to illustrate how the Indian youth movement appropriated the language of Johnson's “Great Society” to argue for a “Greater Indian American.” This analysis evinces the significance of <freedom> in Indian Affairs discourse and the radical possibilities of ideographic transformation in public policy. Ideographs and the Rhetoric of Indian Affairs McGee (1980) argues that ideology in practice is a political language, manifest in slogan-like terminology or one-word summations of collective commitments. For instance, in the American public vocabulary, terms such as <equality>, <rule of law>, <liberty>, and <freedom> rhetorically structure and condition near-reflexive public adherence to the dominant ideology of classical liberalism. “Ideographs” are abstract but highly resonate terms with near universal recognition that recur in political discourse. Their invocations comprise a dominant political consciousness

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